


through the night

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [74]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Beds are liminal spaces, Disabled Character, M/M, Memory, Mentally Ill Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Watching Someone Sleep, recovery is a spiral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 01:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3590601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And loving Steve is easy. Was easy, can't be anything else, and not just him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	through the night

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.

This time, coming out of the dream is slow, steady, gradual. Like coming out of a cold fog into cold daylight. All Bucky's got left when he blinks heavy eyes open is a bunch of complicated, ugly feelings he can't name - but circle around grief like scavengers - and some shapes. Ideas. Something about his parents, or something his fucked up brain wants to use his parents to represent. Symbol sets. Except he can't hold onto what they were supposed to mean. No images, no events. Just . . . knowing. 

Not that he wants to hold onto any of it. A dream fading to nothing but a faint feeling for once is a _relief_. 

He's lying on his right side, curled up with only his hand on Steve's wrist, because he's been restless as fuck lately for no good reason. So not only does Steve fall asleep long before he does, Bucky can't keep _still_ , can't stop turning, sitting up and coming back, rolling over, everything. So when he does finally black out they end up like this - Steve turned on his side to face Bucky just because he always does that; Bucky mirroring because if he can't touch, his stupid fucking brain doesn't believe it's okay to sleep. 

Not his favourite. Better than nothing. A lot better. 

The lump of warmth at his lower back tells him the idiot kitten's trying to get crushed in the night again, and otherwise there's nothing but night-time, ordinary, normal. Siren in the distance; building's air returns; wind; human voices, recorded and not, and the edge of someone's music. On the other side of the bed, facing him, Steve's sleeping deep. Sleeping totally unlike the dead. 

(Because the dead don't frown like they're solving a puzzle and the dead don't breathe in the steady expanding-contracting-expanding of ribcage, contract-release of diaphragm, and the dead definitely don't drool out of a just-open mouth. The dead are cold and still, and even in the lax on either side of rigor they have the rigidness of pieces strung together on joints, instead of being one thing all together, fluid and alive.) 

Steve sleeps the same way he always does; at least this time, the dream let's Bucky just lie there and watch for a while. Without agitation. Without panic scratching at the door. Without having to fight to believe things that are self-evidently fucking true, like that _everything's okay_ and he's got no fucking reason to be so afraid. 

Not tonight. Hell, tonight Bucky doesn't even have to worry Steve's lungs are gonna forget what they're fucking well for and drop out on him. He can just lie here - least unless-until he gets restless again - in the not-quite-dark and just . . . not have there be anything else. And he knows he's groping around a word he doesn't want to think, because if he thinks it it'll all pop like a fucking soap-bubble, but the idea's there anyway. He knows what he means. 

Even memory's not trying to gut him, not right now. 

Most of what he remembers best, it makes sense he would, at least if you know the theories. It's things you'd think about a lot, stuff you'd always be going back to. Moments that were funny, or important, or proud, or shameful. The kind of thing that you'd tell stories about, or remind a friend, or turn over and over in your head alone at night like he's fucking doing right now, tramping down the same mental paths till they're ground in, until you'll always see the shape of them. Most of them are like that. 

Then there's stuff that isn't, and none of it seems to have any rhyme or fucking reason. Like the one that drags him back now, taps him on the shoulder to remind him it's there again. Like sitting on the couch of a woman ten years older than him, her cheating on a husband she hated. Watching as she lit a cigarette and threw herself down next to him. Said, _Sex isn't intimate. Don't let anyone sell you that garbage. Men pay a few dollars to fuck a whore for a few minutes, you think that's fucking intimate? You'd get closer to someone in a fucking fist-fight._

She'd blown out smoke and said, after a pause, _Really_ sleeping _with someone, now, that can be. If you let it. If you let it be sleeping_ with _them instead of just sleeping beside them. And it can sneak up on you even if you don't mean to let it. Be careful,_ she'd said with her cigarette just touching her lips, _who you get into the habit of sleeping beside._

He'd laughed and said something about how she always got him to leave before she fell asleep, not meaning anything by it because frankly he wasn't up for being _that_ kind of affair for someone. 

Wasn't really up for being that tangled up with someone, period. Could only ever see the ways it could go bad. 

And he never told anyone and he only just remembers her name was (he thinks) Elaine, but that memory bled right back into his head before it even fucking applied to him again, before he could even fucking _parse_ the fucking thing or knew what it meant, and it's never gone. Random fucking artifact of neural record. 

Of course _now_ he's not exactly likely to forget it, because he keeps thinking about it, moments like this. Working it in as deep, maybe, as some of the others. 

When he reaches out, it's on impulse he doesn't bother to block, until he stops his outstretched fingers just short of actually tracing the lines Steve's frown leaves above the bridge of his nose. Because Bucky's lying on his right side, and the fingers of his left hand'll be pretty God-damn cold. But the impulse is still what it is, and his hand moves the shape of it. 

It's one of the first faces he ever saw on Steve. Frowning, trying to work out a problem, trying to figure out why this other kid - nominally from the neighbourhood but who he'd never even talked to before - had jumped in and given Robbie Brandon a bloody nose. Frown edging to scowl, with kid-voice wrapping around the words _Wadda_ you _want anyways?_ while his lip swelled up. And he was six but he looked like he was maybe three except he was too skinny. 

And loving Steve is easy. That's the thing. 

Is easy, was easy, can't be anything else, and _not_ just for him - Bucky's _watched_ it catch other people, people smart enough to be caught, some of'em confused as fucking Hell about what exactly was happening, sometimes because he didn't look like what they expected to love, and admittedly sometimes (and Romanova probably counts there) because he was being a jackass and they couldn't figure out why they don't actually want to drown him. 

Always easy. Too easy. 

And if he means it, Bucky should _go_ , knows he should. Except when he thinks it there's no force, no weight: because yeah he should but Steve'd just fucking follow him anyway and Steve _is_ that fucking stubborn, so he'd waste his life and time and _his_ love either way, which lets Bucky off the hook. Lets him stay and pretend he wouldn't be selfish enough to stay even if it wasn't true. 

Because if he walks away from here there's nothing, and he knows it. He knew it when he didn't know fucking _anything_ : he walks away and it's over because there's fucking nothing and even if maybe he's managed to scrape a few fucking pieces of being a person to himself they'll go, they'll be so fucking gone, the second he walks away. And maybe he could lie to himself for a bit but the first time it fell apart, the first time he couldn't remember what the fuck's even real . . . 

And Steve's fucking self-sacrificing stubborn _stupid_ nature saving Bucky from finding out what _he_ can't give up probably counts as irony, somehow. 

Just doesn't matter. 

Bucky pulls his hand back when Steve stirs. Tries to keep it to _pull_ instead of _jerk_ or _snatch_ , tries to make his fucking heart slow back down and ignore the shit that just got dumped into his bloodstream, because he _knows_ he didn't do that. Not unless Steve actually _has_ developed God-damned telepathy. And Steve can wake up in the middle of the night for no reason same as he can. And he is not, not fucking panicking. 

_Fuck_.

Steve squints his eyes open, moves so he can pull his arm out from under his pillow, and he probably just managed to put it the fuck to sleep and that's what woke him up. The frown goes from sleep to outright scowl, taking like at least a fucking decade off his face if not more, while Bucky works on controlling his breath. 

Steve blinks at him for a couple seconds, face smoothing out, and says, "'sit?" voice drowsy and slurred. 

Bucky shakes his head. "Nothing," he says, almost automatic, and Steve frowns at him again, all sleep and suspicion. 

"Liar," he says, and even if there's no fucking way even Steve could actually figure that out in that time, Bucky has to admit it's a fair _bet_ he's lying, saying that in the middle of the night. Even if it's closer to true than most of the time, and only isn't because of . . .stupid reflexes, shit that doesn't matter. 

Steve reaches over to pull on Bucky's left arm a little, just below the joint. Says, "C'mere," and rolls onto his back, like he's forgotten why Bucky _wasn't_ there in the first place. And Bucky briefly considers working the idea of "security blanket" around enough to give Steve shit about it, but he's too tired, and if he doesn't know if he'll be able to get back to sleep he's not _restless_ anymore. 

And he'd be fucking kidding himself if he tried to say hearing Steve's breathing under his own ear or Steve's arm around his waist didn't feel good. Didn't make shoving the last of the panic away almost easy, didn't - at least just for now - make the inside of his head quiet down to a murmur he can ignore, warm and dim. 

Steve gropes around for a second to pull the blankets up and then settles himself and goes the sleeping kind of still. 

That still isn't anything like the dead. 

And Steve's warm and solid and real and smells right and after a few minutes Bucky manages, if not sleep, at least the kind of doze that's happy to stay still and comfortable for hours. 

He'll take it, for as long as he can.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] through the night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4074895) by [echolalaphile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/echolalaphile/pseuds/echolalaphile)




End file.
